New research at an archeological site confirms the assertions that many scholars have made in the past about feminine beauty - that the preference for the fuller female figure extends all the way back to the dawn of time, and is indeed timeless.

The only mixed message in the piece is that it juxtaposes these findings with a picture of Raquel Welch in a '50s film, whereas the archeology consistently confirms that the feminine ideal was always much softer and more generously proportioned than that.

Still, it's an important confirmation of what the essential feminine ideal truly is - an ideal that would still be culturally dominant even today, as it was throughout history, if it weren't for modern media brainwashing that superimposes an artificial ideal over the natural one.

Quote:

Sexiest cavewoman was all curve

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Forget size zero – when it came to pre-year zero our cavemen ancestors desired a woman with curves, archeologists have found.

Whittled flint models made by male hunters 15,000 years ago have given a pretty good idea of the type of girl they considered to be their pre-historic calendar girl.

They went without fail, for 'voluptuous' shapes with 'prominent' bottoms.

Thirty flint figurines were unearthed at a site in Poland, all of them showing off 'curvaceous womanly shapes with prominent [curves]'.

It is believed fuller figures were preferred, because they suggested the woman was wealthy, well-fed and healthily looked-after by a successful hunter partner.

The site in central Poland is thought to have been a popular hang-out for hunters, with the remains of a woolly rhinoceros, a horse and an Arctic fox also found close by.

More than 10,000 remnants of a Late Magdalenian settlement have been found at the site.

We all know about those hand-sized Ice Age women carved in stone – those plump ladies with huge breasts and behinds, tiny heads, artful hairdos and no faces.

They're known as Palaeolithic Venuses and they raise a lot of puzzling questions: How come these almost identical figurines were found all the way from France to Siberia? How come this stylised carving tradition was practised and passed down over 20,000 years? What purpose did they serve?...

Professor Dale Guthrie, from the university of Alaska, and author of The Nature of Paleolithic Art, is surprised that while Paleolithic people were surrounded by plenty of things – babies, men, animals, plants, battle scenes, clan symbols – these things were never represented in their art, only well-endowed women. Guthrie suggests that all the figurines were made by young men and "it's not too difficult to theorise about what was on their minds in their free time". He thinks the similarly stylised Venus figures represent a cross-cultural view of women shared by prehistoric Europeans...for more than 20,000 years.

That a fashionable body shape should persist for 20,000 years is almost beyond the comprehension of modern Europeans. Our fashionable shape-shifting ladies have rapidly morphed from the Belle Epoche hourglass, to the Edwardian bustle shape, to the curveless boy-like creatures of the 1920s, to today's skeletal catwalk strutters foisted on us by women and poofter fashion designers

These days a red-blooded man can lose all respectability by admitting to a penchant for well-endowed women. But, underground, hankering after Ice Age beauties is alive and well.

A minute on the Internet will reveal about a million [Web] sites displaying beckoning super-curvy ladies with acres of arched backs and Paleolithic backsides.

The author doesn't draw the obvious conclusion: that the "fashionable" full-figured body shape that he describes -- which persisted for 20,000 years, and continued right until the 1920s, when it was displaced by the androgynous standard that persists until today -- was "fashionable" because it represents the true, archetypal ideal of female beauty. And if certain communities hadn't come to dominate Western culture starting at the time of the "shape change" of the cultural ideal, it would still be in place today.

These findings are wonderful, but not at all surprising. Studies in evolutionary psychology, which continually find parallels between the archaeological record and the legacy of human art, have conclusively established that the natural preference for plus-size beauty is as old as humanity itself.

Last year, we discussed a fascinating book titled The Nature of Paleolithic Art, which demonstrated that the majority of prehistoric artistic endeavour was devoted to the celebration of full-figured beauty.

Another recent book, titled Time and Power by Leonard Shlain, argues that the essence of male attraction to the female of the species is grounded in the passion engendered in men by the sight of soft curves:

Instead of gorgeous colors, fantastic markings, sleek hides, sumptuous fur, bright feathers, or polychromatic scales, Mother Nature decided to use f**. . . . Positioned alluringly beneath the skin in just the right proportions and in just the right places, oleaginous avoirdupois can drive a man wild with intoxicating desire.

No other female creature uses adipose tissue as an infrastructure of its primary sexual signaling device. Few animals, other than sea mammals, even possess subcutaneous f** deposits. Human sport ten times more f** cells under their skin than other land animals... (354)

Far from being a marginal preference, Shlain argues, this is the norm of male attraction, and has been since the dawn of time:

The human male is a consummate hunter. His success depends on his constant alertness for the slightest movement occurring in the periphery of his field of vision. The motion sensors out in the extremities of the male retina can detect a nearly subliminal shudder at the edges of his line of sight. . . . This attribute, so essential to hunting, was shanghaied into the service of Natural Selection. The Red Queen engaged a man's hunting rods to attract him to a woman. "She caught my eye," he means it both literally and figuratively, whether it is the slight jiggle to a woman's breasts when she walks, or the curve of her ankle, calf, and thigh.

[By contrast,] f** plays a lean role in a male's attractiveness to a female. Chiseled muscular definition and washboard abdomens devoid of subcutneous f** are the physical features most likely to "catch the eye" of a woman.

Shlain provides a convincing rationale to explain why men are hardwired to find the well-fed female figure so attractive:

Mother Nature's peculiar choice of f** to entice men is not so strange as it seems. Minus a clear signal from her that she was ovulating, the male of the human species must make an assessment as to the potential fertility of a female based on her appearance. The metabolic needs to gestate a human fetus are so great that Mother Nature will not allow menarche to begin until a prospective mother has enough of the yellow energy stuff in reserve. A girl cannot menstruate until a certain critical mass of f** has accumulated on her frame. These f** reserves could have been stored deep inside the abdominal or chest cavities (where they reside in most other animals). Instead, f** is strategically arranged just under the skin to round out the human female form.

Natural Selection put the human species in a precarious bind when Gyna Sapiens abandoned estrus signaling. The problem was somewhat ameliorated by the instillation in the male psyche of an attraction to a female exhibiting soft curves in all the right places. Feminine beauty and potential fertility are inextricably grounded in subcutaneous f**. (355-56)

In another chapter, Shlain relays the findings of a growing number of anthropologists who have determined that human interaction originated in a relationship between males and females in which the former provided the latter with meat from the hunt, for which the latter rewarded the former with affection.

He encapsulates this in a pithy anecdote:

Kung San tribespeople of the Kalahari, when asked why some men who were poor hunters could not convince a woman to marry, responded, "Women like meat." (112)

The growing consensus in the scientific community, then, is that from the dawn of time, human relationships were based on two factors:

(1) the male attraction to the soft fullness of the female figure (the fuller the figure, the greater the attraction); and
(2) an impulse on the part of men to provide women with food, and to delight in the latter's enjoyment of that provender.

Modern society--and specifically, the modern media, which is governed by alien ideologies that are antithetical to human nature--has suppressed and even stigmatized these essential human impulses, but they live on in the human heart. A great society would be one that would acknowledge these natural human drives, and celebrate them, for they laid the foundation for the triumph of humanity.